著者

河野 哲子 Kono Tetsuko

出版者

名古屋大学英文学会

雑誌

IVY (ISSN:09142266)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.51, pp.1-26, 2018-11-30

---

Christopher Nolan is a master of puzzling narrative films including Memento, The Dark Knight, and Interstellar, among his many other blockbusters. In 2017, he released Dunkirk, his first war film, which he defines as a survival story. This article examines the film’s complicated narrative, with special focus on Mr. Dawson as a key person. It also analyzes the film’s kinesthetically affective style, to pin down its stylistic and aesthetic qualities and explore their possible function of establishing the audience’s reception of memories of the historical evacuation of Dunkirk in the early days of the Second World War. The world of Dunkirk can be broken into three areas, the land (which is in fact “the mole”), the sea, and the sky. Each of them, however, has a different time span, one week, one day, and one hour, respectively. They intertwine alternately to compose the whole puzzling sequence. This hectic time scheme is one of the most idiosyncratic features of Dunkirk, preventing the chronological flow of the story, and demanding the audience’s repeated viewing for understanding. From a narratological viewpoint, Nolan’s Dunkirk can be said to have a touch of “puzzle films”, as exemplified by Warren Buckland, with its contingencies and deceptions brought by frantic but strategic cuts in the film. If what happens on Dawson’s boat is rearranged chronologically with some twists in the film sorted out, the symbolic meaning of his existence will emerge as a hub to hold the whole narrative of Dunkirk. His emblematic predominance is aptly and necessarily contrived because the original historical facts of Dunkirk are mainly related to the miracle of “little boats”. Among the main characters in the film, only Dawson is given background information, especially that his eldest son died serving as an RAF pilot, and his discernment is delineated as influenced by the aftermath of the Great War. Dawson is assigned to function as a hinge to link two generations together, as well as to unify the people contingently meeting in Dunkirk. As for its aesthetic style, there are three aspects of note in Dunkirk. First, its depiction of explosion and firefight is sometimes so excessive that vibrations are felt in the theater seats. Its effect is greatly enhanced by the IMAX projecting system, which Nolan strongly recommends. With its spectacular stimulation, Dunkirk offers genuinely sensual or physical sensation and shock for pleasure, in which case the audience is exempted from moral impropriety in appreciating the expression of violence. Nolan’s Dunkirk is greatly dependent on this kind of kinesthetic pleasure, traced in the early cinema of attractions and explained originally by Tom Gunning. The near absence of German soldiers as the second stylistic feature of Dunkirk is effective in suppressing inappropriate excitement and agitation on the side of the audience. The ethical conundrum for the audience, usually brought about by the dichotomy of “friend or foe” or “us or them” in the framework of a war story, is prevented mainly with actual German soldiers being obscured in Dunkirk. The third feature is concerned with the beauty and cleanliness predominant throughout the whole story of Dunkirk . The soldiers fatally shot just fall down without much bloodshed and their dying process is not depicted in detail. This is completely different from depictions in Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line. Especially in Saving Private Ryan the brutally wounded soldiers have their intestines exposed or their arms and legs mutilated. The body of the audience and that of wounded soldiers in the films are closely linked in the sense that they are so vulnerable to violence and brutality of war. The excessive aesthetic quality in Dunkirk, however, has the effect of covering up the crude essence of war inflicting brutal damage to the human body. This kind of concealment or suppression is relevant to the aestheticization of war that could be politically abused, dependent on the situation. This seems to be the only crucial moral hazard potentially contained in Dunkirk. Since the 50’s, the film industry has seriously declined in the United Kingdom. A spectacle film featuring Dunkirk evacuation would be impossible without financing from an American film company which trusts Nolan’s potential for making successful films. This background may have certain influence on the content and style of the film, which was intended to be received by as large an audience as possible. In addition to those stylistic features mentioned above, another characteristic should be referred to as an effective factor for making the film agreeable. The mode of narration in Dunkirk is not thrusting, far less thrusting than in Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line, at least. The historical story of cooperation by English people may be amazing, but the message from the story is open to interpretation and acceptance on the side of the audience. Viewed in an IMAX theater, Dunkirk will provide its full kinesthetic and aesthetic impact to the audience. On tablets and other small devices, however, it will tell another story, which is enclosed in its complicated and intense narrative-- the story of a father who tries to save as many young soldiers as possible, feeling deeply remorseful for his generation starting the war and his own son getting killed in it.

著者

小原 文衛 Kohara Bunei

出版者

名古屋大学英文学会

雑誌

IVY (ISSN:09142266)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.49, pp.67-88, 2016-11-30

---

The present paper aims to reexamine the meaning of what Kyle Bishop calls "Zombie Renaissance": the global pandemic or spread of zombie narratives that is supposed to have happened around 2002, namely just after 9/11. This phenomenon has various aspects, and this paper's argument mainly focused on the question what makes possible the global pandemic of the zombie narratives. Section II examines the meaning of the zombie as a representational apparatus by means of the basically categorical and substantial analysis (before embarking on the relational and narratological analysis in section IV). Zombies are classified into the three categories: (1) Voodoo Zombies, (2) Modern Zombies, and (3) Hyper Zombies. Though these three categories of zombies appeared in the film history in chronological order, they do not constitute a linear order (1→2→3), as this paper explains with reference to some examples (section III). In fact, as these examples suggest persuasively, these three categories of zombies coexist in one age: the age of "Zombie Renaissance," which necessarily means that these three types of zombies are representative of different modes of signification. The zombie as representational apparatus implies no integrity, identity, or consistency in it. ln other words, "the zombie means anything." This accordingly leads to another formula: "the zombie can be anywhere" (in the global dimension). From section IV, this paper undertakes the relational or narratological analysis of zombie narratives' structures focusing on the two motifs that frequently and repeatedly appear in the films of this subgenre: "pursuit" and "siege." Section IV examines the meanings of these two motifs examining their places in the history of American films and confirmed that each of them constitutes the archetypal narrative pattern that are essential for gaining deep insight into American cultures. Section V examines how these archetypal motifs play crucial roles in several of Edgar Allan Poe's narratives. "The Black Cat" and "William Wilson" are two of the paradigmatic narratives that have in them the motif of "pursuit." What should be noticed here is that these two tales about "the pursuer" share the metaphoric expression of "the pestilence," which is also identified in the typical zombie narratives (zombies are similar in function to an "epidemic") and that these "pursuers" are absolutely inescapable and accordingly represent the inner space of the pursued (the narrators). As for "siege", "Shadow- a Parable" and "Masque of Red Death" are exemplary. These two tales are also narratives on "the pestilence," where people are besieged by the plague. In each of these tales, exactly like in Romero's narratives about the living dead, what was supposed to be a shelter is finally violated by the plague and becomes a claustrophobic space of death. The two motifs secure the interface between zombie narratives on film and classical narratives composed by Poe. The analysis of this interface between the zombie and Poe paves the way for a further argument and leads to psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud, though implicitly, also refers to the two motifs. In Freud's theoretical framework, the drive is "inescapable" precisely because it comes from the "inside." Freud's drive is placed in the same position as the pursuer in American films, or the living dead, to be more specific (this allegorical trait is also shared by Poe). And again, Freud's theoretical allegory of the "protective shield" is also constructed around the topic of the pressures of the internal drives and marked by the same narrative pattern of the claustrophobic storytelling in Romero and Poe. The motifs of "pursuit" and "siege" are also vital to the narrative called "psychoanalysis," which consequently confirms the link between the two motifs and the universal dimension ("universal" implies "global.") From the substantial perspective, the zombie means anything and they can be anywhere, while the relational analysis shows that zombie narratives are constituted by American and psychologically universal motifs at the same time. Here the key word is the non-identity of the zombie (and supposedly that of America, historically and genetically marked by the lack of the integrated myth of its own) that paradoxically forms a basis for the global adaptability or flexiblity of this subgenre. This very adaptability partly accounts for the global pandemic of the zombie narratives (and this also implies that the zombie pandemic is an indication of Americanization as a crucial constituent of globalization).

著者

滝川 睦 Takikawa Mutsumu

出版者

名古屋大学英文学会

雑誌

IVY (ISSN:09142266)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.53, pp.49-54, 2020-12-15

著者

河野 哲子 Kono Tetsuko

出版者

名古屋大学英文学会

雑誌

IVY (ISSN:09142266)

巻号頁・発行日

no.51, pp.1-26, 2018-11-30

---

Christopher Nolan is a master of puzzling narrative films including Memento, The Dark Knight, and Interstellar, among his many other blockbusters. In 2017, he released Dunkirk, his first war film, which he defines as a survival story. This article examines the film's complicated narrative, with special focus on Mr. Dawson as a key person. It also analyzes the film's kinesthetically affective style, to pin down its stylistic and aesthetic qualities and explore their possible function of establishing the audience's reception of memories of the historical evacuation of Dunkirk in the early days of the Second World War. The world of Dunkirk can be broken into three areas, the land (which is in fact "the mole"), the sea, and the sky. Each of them, however, has a different time span, one week, one day, and one hour, respectively. They intertwine alternately to compose the whole puzzling sequence. This hectic time scheme is one of the most idiosyncratic features of Dunkirk, preventing the chronological flow of the story, and demanding the audience's repeated viewing for understanding. From a narratological viewpoint, Nolan's Dunkirk can be said to have a touch of "puzzle films", as exemplified by Warren Buckland, with its contingencies and deceptions brought by frantic but strategic cuts in the film. If what happens on Dawson's boat is rearranged chronologically with some twists in the film sorted out, the symbolic meaning of his existence will emerge as a hub to hold the whole narrative of Dunkirk. His emblematic predominance is aptly and necessarily contrived because the original historical facts of Dunkirk are mainly related to the miracle of "little boats". Among the main characters in the film, only Dawson is given background information, especially that his eldest son died serving as an RAF pilot, and his discernment is delineated as influenced by the aftermath of the Great War. Dawson is assigned to function as a hinge to link two generations together, as well as to unify the people contingently meeting in Dunkirk. As for its aesthetic style, there are three aspects of note in Dunkirk. First, its depiction of explosion and firefight is sometimes so excessive that vibrations are felt in the theater seats. Its effect is greatly enhanced by the IMAX projecting system, which Nolan strongly recommends. With its spectacular stimulation, Dunkirk offers genuinely sensual or physical sensation and shock for pleasure, in which case the audience is exempted from moral impropriety in appreciating the expression of violence. Nolan's Dunkirk is greatly dependent on this kind of kinesthetic pleasure, traced in the early cinema of attractions and explained originally by Tom Gunning. The near absence of German soldiers as the second stylistic feature of Dunkirk is effective in suppressing inappropriate excitement and agitation on the side of the audience. The ethical conundrum for the audience, usually brought about by the dichotomy of "friend or foe" or "us or them" in the framework of a war story, is prevented mainly with actual German soldiers being obscured in Dunkirk. The third feature is concerned with the beauty and cleanliness predominant throughout the whole story of Dunkirk . The soldiers fatally shot just fall down without much bloodshed and their dying process is not depicted in detail. This is completely different from depictions in Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line. Especially in Saving Private Ryan the brutally wounded soldiers have their intestines exposed or their arms and legs mutilated. The body of the audience and that of wounded soldiers in the films are closely linked in the sense that they are so vulnerable to violence and brutality of war. The excessive aesthetic quality in Dunkirk, however, has the effect of covering up the crude essence of war inflicting brutal damage to the human body. This kind of concealment or suppression is relevant to the aestheticization of war that could be politically abused, dependent on the situation. This seems to be the only crucial moral hazard potentially contained in Dunkirk. Since the 50's, the film industry has seriously declined in the United Kingdom. A spectacle film featuring Dunkirk evacuation would be impossible without financing from an American film company which trusts Nolan's potential for making successful films. This background may have certain influence on the content and style of the film, which was intended to be received by as large an audience as possible. In addition to those stylistic features mentioned above, another characteristic should be referred to as an effective factor for making the film agreeable. The mode of narration in Dunkirk is not thrusting, far less thrusting than in Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line, at least. The historical story of cooperation by English people may be amazing, but the message from the story is open to interpretation and acceptance on the side of the audience. Viewed in an IMAX theater, Dunkirk will provide its full kinesthetic and aesthetic impact to the audience. On tablets and other small devices, however, it will tell another story, which is enclosed in its complicated and intense narrative-- the story of a father who tries to save as many young soldiers as possible, feeling deeply remorseful for his generation starting the war and his own son getting killed in it.

著者

楠 明子 Kusunoki Akiko

出版者

名古屋大学英文学会

雑誌

IVY (ISSN:09142266)

巻号頁・発行日

no.41, pp.21-42, 2008-11-30

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In contrast to Urania and her sonnet sequence,the aspects of Love's Victory, Mary Wroth's only extant play, which have hitherto attracted the most critical attention are the constraints on Wroth's expression of her views of female agency. Yet Wroth's representations of women's sense of self in this play need to be further explored in terms of her response to dramatic representations of womanhood in other English Renaissance plays, in particular to the plays of Shakespeare. Insightful comparisons of Wroth's works and Shakespeare's plays were made in pioneering studies by Josephine Roberts, Barbara Lewalski and Naomi Miller, but since then not much critical work on Wroth's play has adopted this perspective. It is almost certain that Wroth knew Shakespeare, probably even personally, through William Herbert, who was her lover/cousin and one of Shakespeare's patrons. She must have been quite familiar with Shakespeare's plays; indeed, she may have seen almost all the court productions of Shakespeare. This essay will explore the concerns expressed by Wroth in Love's Victory in relation to a number of problems left unresolved in Shakespeare's plays, as well as with reference to the representations of these concerns in Urania Part I and Part II. These issues will include the problems of male jealousy, the changeability of men's emotions, and women's awareness of gender ideologies in society, especially those related to their ageing and their powerlessness. Among Shakespeare's plays, the discussion will centre on Othello (1604) and The Winter's Tale (1611), referring also to Romeo and Juliet (1593) and Twelfth Night (1600). As Alison Findlay has demonstrated, Love's Victory was probably performed in some part of the Garden or the Great Hall of Penshurst Place. Most critics find Wroth's attitude to gender ideologies in Jacobean society in the play less challenging than is the case in the two parts of Urania and the sonnet sequence. Explanations for this are usually linked to the likelihood that the play was most probably intended or performed for the Sidney inner circle. And yet, many of the members of that circle must have known Shakespeare's plays extremely well. The essay thus argues that, for an audience who had knowledge of Shakespeare's treatments of women's issues, Love's Victory constituted a challenging response to social assumptions about gender boundaries. Through the delicate manipulation of Shakespeare's treatments of women's issues, and their revision from female points of view, Wroth in fact offered to her audience of the Sidney circle not the happy traditional pastoral comedy which Love's Victory at first sight appears to be, but a quite radical view of gender distinctions in Stuart England. Wroth's challenging attitudes even to the familial discourse of Sidney/Herberts has been discussed in Marion Wynne-Davies' recently published, ground-breaking study of Love's Victory (Familial Discourse 89-103). Though not paying much attention to the relationship of Wroth's play to Shakespeare, Wynne-Davies discusses the significance of Wroth's play for the genre of tragi-comedy, a popular literary form at the time, in the political context of 1612-1619. This essay will finally discuss Wroth's challenge to contemporary gender assumptions in the light of Wynne­-Davies' reading of the play as "the emergent politicisation of tragi-comedy (Familial Discourse 103).本論は2007年度名古屋大学英文学会サマーセミナー(2007年7月20日)における講演に基づくものである。

著者

舌津 智之 Zettu Tomoyuki

出版者

名古屋大学英文学会

雑誌

IVY (ISSN:09142266)

巻号頁・発行日

no.45, pp.55-73, 2012-11-30

---

本稿は,2011年度名古屋大学英文学会クリスマス・セミナー(2011年12月9日)の講演に基づき,加筆修正を施したものである。

著者

藤平 育子 Fujihira Ikuko

出版者

名古屋大学英文学会

雑誌

IVY (ISSN:09142266)

巻号頁・発行日

no.44, pp.83-105, 2011-11-30

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Édouard Glissant, notes that "Faulkner's oeuvre will be complete when it is revisited and made vital by African-Americans" (Glissant, Faulkner 55), and highly appreciates the efforts of Toni Morrison. In 1944, in his letter to Malcolm Cowley, Faulkner confessed his ambitious dream as a writer to go beyond his predecessor, Thomas Wolfe, who "was trying to say everything, get everything, the world plus 'I' or filtered through 'I' or the effort of 'I' to embrace the world in which he was born ... into one volume" (Blotner, Selected Letters 185). It was quite fortunate for Faulkner's ambition to capture the world filtered through "I" that Glissant recognized Faulkner's work as "écho-monde" just like "Bob Marley's song ... the architecture of Chicago ... the shantytowns of Rio or Caracas; Ezra Pound's Cantos" or "the marching of schoolchildren in Soweto." (Glissant, Poetics of Relation 93). This paper attempts to trace what Glissant calls the "écho-monde" in Faulkner and Morrison's novels, while we pursue the imaginary space of "creole," errantry, borders, sea and home, represented in their novels. In Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha argues the modern literature as "the literature of recognition," by developing Franz Fanon's desire for "a world of reciprocal recognitions" (quoted in Bhabha 8). Bhabha admires Toni Morrison's Beloved just because the novel illustrates the writer's "ethical and aesthetic project of 'seeing inwardness from the outside' furthest or deepest" and Morrison writes about a ghost "who should want to be realized" (Ibid., 16). Sethe, the former slave woman, has to recognize the phantom shape of her dead daughter, when the ghost of Beloved comes back to the real world eighteen years after the mother killed her. In this context, we can begin to consider the reason why Joe Christmas, in Faulkner's Light in August, comes back to Jefferson, Mississippi, fifteen years after he leaves his foster home in the same state. Christmas, with his "parchment-colored" skin, can live as white in the North, or at least he passes as "white" even in other Southern cities, but he comes back to the small Mississippi city, as though he had known all those fifteen years that he was destined to be lynched there recognized as a black rapist. In fact, Christmas keeps running the street for fifteen years to be "recognized" as someone, either white or black: "The street ran into Oklahoma and Missouri and as far south as Mexico and then back north to Chicago and Detroit and back south again and at last to Mississippi" (Faulkner, Light in August 224). Christmas "enlisted in the army, served four months and deserted and was never caught" (Ibid.). It seems to me that he simply wished to be recognized as somebody when he enlisted in the army and deserted, but nobody recognizes him even as a deserter. After his murder of Joanna Burden in Jefferson, Christmas attacks a black church and assaults a man, apparently to be recognized as a black criminal. Back in Mottstown, Mississippi, in his flight from the posse of Joanna Burden's murder case, Christmas knows that the townspeople "recognized" (Ibid., 337) him, but at the same time he notices that they would not capture him until the time comes "like the rule says" (Ibid.). When he is captured, Mrs. Hines recognizes him as her lost grandson, and the white supremacist Percy Grimm lynches him as a black man who raped and killed a white lady. As a consequence, we can safely assume that Christmas finally comes back home to be recognized as a black son of the Jim Crow South in early 1930s. Consolata Sosa, in Morrison's Paradise, stolen and lost from a dingy city in South America, is found by her twin brother from Brazil, when she was killed at the Convent in Oklahoma. Dislocated from home for a long time, she had lost her language and culture from her native land, but the brother in his ethnic costume comfortably envelopes her in their common language and culture. Miraculously, she is peacefully embraced by the black pieta, Piedade, on the shore of her home land. Beloved probably comes back home from the bottom of the Caribbean Sea, where millions of the Africans lie down, unnoticed and unrecognized by anybody for hundreds of years. When Glissant uses Derek Walcott's famous line, "Sea is History," as epigraph to his Poetics of Relation, the sea means the bottom of the Caribbean Sea where the homeless children join their slave mothers, their sisters and brothers. In Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Quentin Compson's grandfather, in talking about Haiti where Thomas Sutpen goes to be rich, refers to the victimized mothers and children from Africa on the slave ships: "the doomed ships had fled in vain, out of which the last tatter of sail had sunk into the blue sea, along which the last vain despairing cry of woman or child had blown away" (Faulkner, Absalom 202). As argued above, both Faulkner and Morrison represent the solitude and pain of the individual unhomed children as they journey back to their home, while displaying errantry, displacement, or dislocation in the modern world. Further, both writers see the ocean as a signified home for the lost children and mothers; the sea, locus of the crime of slavery and American history, becomes the topos of the writers' memory and conscience, eventually enabling their works to be the "écho-monde."本稿は,2010年度名古屋大学英文学会サマーセミナー(2010年7月16日)における講演に基づき、改稿したものである。